Lunar Poisoning
by irishileana
Summary: Cave Johnson's illness could be faulted to one person. Caveline angst, can be read platonically.


The lights were dim over her desk, sickly yellow bulbs that flickered at the rate of death within the building—meaning, of course, that they fluttered every 30 seconds or so. This gave her a constant headache, but with Aperture the way it was, they had to cut costs somewhere. They had to cut costs _everywhere_. Caroline couldn't place the exact moment she'd started working for less than free, but she'd scrawled so many hasty cheques to cover bills that she knew she must be giving more money to the company than she was getting.

In the end, everyone paid the price for science.

She'd advised him against it, of course. Spending 70 million dollars on _moon rocks _when the company was further in the hole than the mine shaft that held it . . . it was unfeasible. It wasn't just reckless; it was downright _stupid_. Who the hell had even agreed to let a company like Aperture buy something like that—especially given the fact that the company was _literally bankrupt_? It was possibly the most idiotic idea he'd _ever _had, and that was saying a lot, considering the place would have come crumbling down around them without her—

Her gut twisted and she signed another document. She was a horrible person. She was already disrespecting his memory, and he wasn't even d—he wasn't gone yet. He could barely breathe through poisoned lungs, and she was branding him a fool, even though the whole thing was her fault in the end. She was a horrible, disgusting, awful human being.

She should have tried harder to stop him. As his assistant, she was responsible for him; wasn't that the whole point of her job? He called her the "backbone" of Aperture, but she wasn't able to hold the place up when it mattered most. She wasn't even able to keep him alive.

She'd failed.

Her vision blurred and for one split, hysterical second she wondered if she was having a stroke. Surely the strain of Aperture would catch up with her one day—_before _she ended up losing her mind to a machine. The splash of a tear smudging a freshly-printed page set her back in the moment. Of course she was crying. She was crying, and she was weak, and she'd failed, and he wanted to put _her _in charge of the company? The lunar poison had clearly reached his mind.

With a clumsy swipe of her sleeve, she wiped her eyes, throwing open a drawer of her desk in search of a proper tissue. Ordinarily, she'd have been able to find anything she needed in seconds, but she'd gotten sloppy recently. Big surprise. The stress of working in a company determined to bury itself had finally caught up with her, and there was just too much to do to focus on desk organization. She was a mess.

Fortunately, the tissues couldn't be too far away. She'd been tearing through them as of late, so while a few documents had been tossed haphazardly on top of them, they were well within reach. At least she hadn't failed on that front. As she pulled out her steadily-dwindling supply, a thin slip of paper was dislodged from underneath, catching the air and hovering for a moment before drifting to the floor. She picked it up with a sigh, scanning over it to see if it could be shredded.

_. . . Pounds of lunar sediment_ . . .

The paper slipped out of her shaking hands. In only a glance, she'd recognized it for what it was: A receipt. Specifically, it was a receipt for 70 million dollars in moon rocks. It was a receipt for a pile of junk that they didn't have the money to buy and that had poisoned the one man who had seemed unbeatable. It was a receipt for a purchase she hadn't stopped him from making.

Cave Johnson had founded this company. He'd run it from the ground up—and later, he'd driven it to the ground. He was the one in charge, but he depended on her. She was responsible for keeping him from making terrible mistakes; she was responsible for _him_. If she'd just been doing her damn job, things would have been different. Instead she was a poison, choking his lungs with her own failure, suffocating the halls of Aperture with a toxin even she could never escape.

She reached for another tissue and continued to sign her life away.


End file.
